Job creation is our best weapon against poverty: Tim Spohn

Any time a job is created, it has the chance to protect, or lift, an entire family from poverty.

As bold as that might sound, job creation remains the best weapon we have in the War on Poverty, a battle begun a half-century ago and without an end in sight.

On Aug. 20, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Economic Opportunity Act, the Southern California Association of Governments and the Southern California Leadership Council will host a summit on where we go from here in our efforts to combat poverty.

Sadly, we’ve got a considerable ways to go. According to SCAG numbers from December, poverty levels in Southern California have jumped from 13 percent to 18 percent of the population since 1990, with one in four children currently living below the poverty line.

Throwing money at the problem hasn’t worked. Entitlement programs aren’t the answer. What we need are jobs that can lift families from dependency to self-sufficiency and break the cycle of despair that has grown wider with each new generation.

That’s no simple fix, of course. Our ability to create jobs hinges on many things — regulations, the cost of doing business, the training and competitiveness of our work force. More often than not in recent years, these have been significant barriers, particularly to the kinds of jobs that support middle-class families.

In the city of Industry, we’re in the developmental stages of an initiative we hope will be a model for middle-class job creation. Working with the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership, our goal is to create career pathways for young people entering the work force through partnerships between businesses in our city and local school districts.

Not every student is four-year college material. Even among those who do graduate with a bachelor’s degree, a growing number of them struggle to find sustainable work in a field suited to their skill sets. Through internships and job-training programs, we believe we can start to better align the needs of businesses with a capable work force, while providing opportunity to students who might otherwise fall off the grid.

In some ways, it’s a throwback to the days when vocational training was a vibrant part of the education process. Mandates that focus more on a student’s testing skills than his or her ability to hold a job have forced away many vocational and technical programs, leaving countless millions of students nationwide with nowhere to go once high school ends. Without an adequate labor force, manufacturers and other business have had to look elsewhere — often overseas — for trained workers, which in turn threatens other American jobs.

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This cycle simply has to end if America has any chance of restoring its economic dominance, bringing back the middle class and ending poverty.

We applaud SCAG and the Southern California Leadership Council for reminding us that 50 years later, the war is nowhere near over and that job creation is our one true pathway to victory.